The first sentence of the last paragraph should read, “By deciding to tax cars directly, we are effectively abandoning options 1 and 3″

I suspect it would be theft still, because I doubt the money is actually going to the injured parties. Additionally, there are practical problems with accurately calculating people’s contribution to the damage.

Let us postulate two roads. Road A goes into a valley that is prone to inversion layers. Road B runs along a mountain ridge and the acidic discharge is blown out harmlessly into the ocean.

Let us say that the two roads are sufficiently close that the people who drive on those roads are intermingled and pay uniform taxes for gasoline and vehicle registrations.

The people who drive mostly on road B are doing far less damage than the people driving on Road A. Yet they pay the same taxes. So the people driving on road A are creating damage a portion of which becomes an externality, and the people driving on Road B are paying for damage they have not done.

Let’s say that I open a tunnel through the rockies, and it has a supper ventillation system so no exhaust ever escapes into the atmosphere. There the drivers are causing no damage, yet they will be taxed nonetheless.

The problem here is that the cars are not in and of themselves the problem. the damage the cars do are inherently tied to where they are driven and at what speed they are driven. Who decides what cars are permitted on the roads? The road owners. Who decides what speeds they drive at? The road owners. Who controls where the roads are located? The road owners. Who controlls the emissions that are allowed to escape? The road owners.

Now, you could argue that the road owners will pass their costs oto their customers and charge fees based on speed, gasoline consumption, engine type etc, and that I am splitting hair meaninglessly.

However, taxing drivers misses an important incentive. Road design is removed from the equation.

A road owner faced with a liability for the pollution he spews out has three choices:
1) Ban pollution sources (no cars allowed!)
2) Pay for the damage he causes (all car drivers must pay a fee based on car model/emission testing/gasoline consumption)
3) Reduce the damage he is causing by capturing emissions or rerouting his road.

By deciding to tax cars directly, we are effectively abandoning options 1 and 2. Now, I don’t know what ingenious devices road owners will dream up to solve their lawsuit problem. But absolving them of bearing the costs of their decisions will ensure that they will never exert an ounce of brain-power to inventing them.

Getting back to one of the points, though, regarding theft. You brought up the fact that charging people who are not polluting (your example of the car bought for preservation, not transportation, purposes) would be theft. In that, I would agree with you. But as I pointed out, there are ways to structure the penalties in such a way that you wouldn’t pay in that instance. Likewise, if the government over-charged people for the damages caused by pollution (as I highly fear government would do), it would be theft. That is a blind spot that the commentors here (suggesting that government will have to raise the penalties of pollution as people begin polluting less) are bringing up.

But in the case where the pollution penalties were dispersed equitably, such that people accurately paid penalties in accordance with the damage they cause, would you still consider it theft?

If I build a road, I could hardly argue that I didn’t intend people to drive on it, could I?

How is the owner of a transcontinental roadway any different than the hypothetical neighbor who builds a racetrack next-door?

If I rent my property out to someone for the express purpose of allowing them to refine gold using mercury, then I am responsible for the pollution flowing from my property to my neighbors property.

A road owner who invites people to use his property in a way that damages his neighbors property is responsible for the mess he causes.

If your neighbor built a racetrack and started permitting paying customers to drive noisy two-stroke minirace cars, would you be upset at him, or his customers? Would you take him to court, or his thousands of customers?

This not akin to suing gun-manufacturers. It is akin to suing firing-range owners who don’t take the required steps to prevent bullets from straying into other people’s property.

The other gigantic blind spot in the “sue the road owner” argument is that you end up in a gun’s kill people argument. Individuals are free to use non-polluting equipment on the road, and therefore one cannot blindly blame the pollution on the owner of the road. Logan’s permit system would be a partial solution in that a system of permits traded between road users, road owners, and the sufferers could reach a market price for pollution – and allow each group to take responsibility for the pollution, and therefore pass it along to the guilty party. But if the state is collecting, the state would still have an incentive to promote pollution and misappropriate the funds for actions other than cleaning the pollution up.

Consider the situation where person A and person B live next to each other, and B is in the habit of throwing trash onto A’s property.

So A sues B and gets a judgement against him. Then B dumps more trash in A’s yard. This is a new injury, and A suing B again is not a “repeated nusicance suit”

Now, let’s say B wants to keep throwing trash on A’s land. Well, then he pays for the privilege. So, he has to make a deal with A, perhaps he pays $10,000 for an easement or whatever.

A decides to sell the land to C. Well, if A does not tell C about the easement, and then C, unaware of the agreement, sues B then B & C can go after A for the costs of the fraud.

Let us take up the example of people fed up with Smog suing the owners of I-95. now, to prevail, the plaintiffs need to show that they were injured. It is easy with smog or soot. You can point to damage to buildings, health troubles etc. It’s even possible to calculate damages.

If I were a road-owner who lost such a suit, I would want to arrange not to be sued again. It might mean shutting down the road entirely, it might mean continuing to operate the road, expecting to periodically pay judgements, it might mean negotiating an agreement with my neighbors wherein I get to continue polluting, but at an acceptable level/paying them for future problems.

One could, alternatively, start with a system of permits rather than taxation of pollution directly. Auctioning off these pollution permits would raise revenue. At first the cap on permits would be close to what we produce now, but slowly reducing the number of permits over time would increase the cost of polluting and encourage the development of technologies to cut back on pollution. But by constantly reducing the number of permits, the revenue stream could still be maintained.

The alternative, our current dependency on taxes on payroll and income and capital, is worse off I would say.

That’s why I wonder whether government can accurately set rates. Subject pollution taxes to the political process, and I fear they’d muck it up, like everthing else.

Tarran,

The car example is tough. Front-loading the tax on the purchase of a car does have that drawback. Likewise, taxing the gasoline is more equitable, but that doesn’t draw a distinction between whether I’m riding an old two-stroke motorcycle spewing a gas-oil mix in the air, or a “clean” vehicle. The most equitable solution would be to charge the tax yearly at registration time, based on the type of car driven and the mileage covered through the year. That would allow people like you, who would be buying the car for preservation in a museum, to avoid the pollution tax.

But in your doctrinaire an-cap position, I still see a blind spot. When the lawsuit is filed against a road owner, who gets the proceeds? Well, only the parties to the suit, of course. Does that mean that if I move into an area, and the local homeowners have already sued the road owners, I don’t get to sue them again for the damages done to me? Or do the road owners become subjected to monthly/yearly nuisance suits? I’m not going to say it’s not possible to do this, but I don’t know if it’s very feasible.

TF,

I don’t think it’s completely a fair analogy. The cigarette taxes are there to compensate the government for providing health care to the smoker. In essence, they’re paying the government a penalty for the financial burden they put onto me. Get rid of government payments into health care, and it suddenly ceases to be a problem, because their health problems no longer injure me financially. Not so with pollution, which is actually a harm done directly to me by the polluter, whether the government exists or not.

Such is the case with your proposed pollution tax. This is no different than the sin tax placed on those who purchase cigarettes. The claimed notion is that these filthy smokers will offset that nasty habit by contributing to fix something else, not necessarily of their own doing. In the case of smokers, those horrible people with nicotine stains on their skinny death wielding fingers, we are to believe that the exorbitant tax applied to their tobacco products will pay for, of all things, the increased costs of health care across the board. The only way to produce such a tax is for these wicked people to become heroes by smoking for evermore, as long as they are killing themselves off a pack of cigarettes at a time, the economy thrives. Sorry, Nyeeeit!

It is theft, though. If I purchase a c
ar, which I intend to store in a museum and never drive, I will still pay for pollution damages. To punish people for a crime they are not committing strikes me as pretty inequitable.

My doctrinaire anarcho-capitalist position – sue the property owners who are producing the emissions. sue the factories, sue the power stations, and most importantly sue the road-owners.

In the case of automobile pollution, it is the road owners who are inviting people to drive the vehicles on their property. The emissions drift from the road to adjacent properties creating smog.

The road owners will of course react by trying to manage emissions. Some will mandate that cars must have catalytic converters to drive on their property. Others will charge higher fees. Others will demand that drivers only burn particular fuels. they may fund research labs to come up with ways to produce pollution free cars.

Currently, of course, the roads are owned by the state, and we live in a paradigm of road socialism. The externalities arise not because of a breakdown of anarcho-capitalist theory, but rather are inherent to the socialist idea that people should be permitted to use roads without paying directly for them.

The question, then, is whether it is desirable to make pollution something good for the government. Would the natural tension between pollution-is-bad and government-wants-to-grow keep both of them down, as the government raises prices on pollution and people do less of it? Or would there suddenly be a bunch of studies suggesting that what we consider pollution is really just fine for the earth?